The Mission Operations Center

The Mission Operations
Center
is located at
Pennsylvania State University
in State College, PA. It operates the Swift satellite and
its instruments. The
MOC
supports
pre-launch, launch, early orbit activation, as well as normal and
contingency operations. The
MOC
performs
all spacecraft and instrument mission planning, commanding, and
monitoring.

Telemetry (Level 0) data from a ground-station contact are sent to
the MOC.
The MOC
processes these data into packets, which are grouped by data type and
sorted by time, and then makes them available to the Swift
Data Center.

The MOC
also has the ability to upload rapid response instructions to Swift. These allow follow-up observations of new GRBs detected by
the on-board FoM software, and ToO inputs from the science team or the
science community.